Four of the men who pleaded guilty to preparing for acts of terrorism - Ishaaq Hussain, Shahid Khan, Khobaib Hussain and Naweed Ali - did so on the basis that they had left their family homes in Birmingham and headed off to join a camp run by men they saw as leading the fight for Islam.In truth, the trip was an unmitigated disaster.

I'm not sure which is my fave bit: their sneaking out of the "camp" in the middle of the night or having to call family back in the UK to arrange for them to get home again.

There is no explanation as what would happen to images/works that have been hard watermarked.In otherwords you put "copyright of" in the images/writing etc instead of relying on meta-data

This is an incredibly ill conceived piece of legislation, just for the storm of litigation that will bung upeverything, and then you add an international element because the net crosses all borders, we've just shot ourselves in the foot. For no real good reason.

The Arab Gulf states are home to some of the most spectacular high-rise towers in the world. But some building experts say that many of those towers are sheathed in a highly flammable material that puts occupants at risk.In the UAE one expert has estimated that 70% of the high-rise buildings there have panel facade cladding made of a combustible thermo-plastic core held between two sheets of aluminium.When the panel ignites, fire spreads rapidly, racing to the top of the building and sending flaming debris hurtling to the streets below. "Like a Roman candle" is how one observer described it.The sheathing has not been used in the UK since the 1980s and codes in the United States specifically prohibit their use in buildings of more than three or four stories."

Racially segregated proms have been held in Wilcox County almost every year since the schools integrated in the 1970s. In a long-standing tradition, parents raised money to host separate dances, the community referred to one as the "black prom" and the other as the "white prom." Traditionally, most students were welcome to the "black prom" but an unwritten rule kept students of different races from attending the "white prom."

Yes, it's badly thought out, and as a visual artist who puts images of his work up on the web I'm reading a lot about it, and am concerned.

But it's worth pointing out that (my emphasis in bold):

Under the Government's plans, organisations that wish to use orphan works would have to conduct a 'diligent search' for the owner of orphan works before they could use the material. The searches would have to be verified as diligent by independent authorising bodies. In addition, organisations would have to pay a "market rate" to use orphan works so as rights holders could be recompensed for the use of the works if they were later identified.

So, a company can't just claim it did a diligent search (i.e. it didn't bother) because the search needs to be "verified as diligent by independent authorising bodies". Obviously there's a worry that the "independent authorising bodies" will be toothless and in the pockets of big corporations, but this remains to be seen.

And if the real copyright holder of the image is identified after the image has been used (i.e. after a diligent search that has been verified by an independent body failed to find the copyright holder) then the company that used the image has to retrospectively pay a "market rate" to the copyright owner.

So that would actually force companies who 'steal' artwork off the internet and use it to pay up. Hopefully (IANAL) making it easier to get cash out of them than the traditional approach of suing them, which is not a viable financial possibility for most artists & photographers.

Given that the law has passed (it's here, we need to deal with it), I think the two areas that artists & photographers should concentrate on are:

Ensuring the "independent authorising bodies" have enough independence and teeth to ensure that a diligent search is indeed diligent, and is not restricted to just running a search in a proprietary copyright-licensing database that artists/photographers have to pay to be included in.

Ensuring that the "market rates" that companies would be force to pay retrospectively are indeed market rates and not insultingly small token payments.